Artist Jim White’s religious past finds him still

It’s not easy being a heretical recluse in these days of social media. Defenders of the faith can find you so much easier now.Alt-country songwriter Jim White admits he spends much of his time holed up in his Athens, Ga. home immersed in the lonely creation of various art projects, be they visual, musical or literary.

But his Facebook page has helped those from his God-fearing past catch up with him, whether he’s wants them to or not.

“I’m what’s called a backslider from the Christian church,” says White. “To this day I’m still defending my decision to leave the church from friends who are now on Facebook and have tracked me down. They’re asking me ‘What happened? You used to be such a good person.’ And I’m such a bad person now because I don’t believe in Jesus, guns, guts and glory and all the weird hyper-Christian nationalism that’s going on in America right now.”

This straying from the flock, which White’s former pastor back home in Pensacola, Fla. calls his “hallelujah breakdown,” has not prevented Christian imagery from entering into his writing these past 15 years, starting with the darkly funny and deeply weird songs found on his 1997 debut Wrong-Eyed Jesus!

“I’m working it out,” says White, who will perform at this year’s Calgary Folk Music Festival. “It’s like one of my teachers at school said, it’s my ‘talking cure.’ I’m working it out and I want to leave it behind and just be a regular person. That’s my goal, to say these things enough where they don’t have power over me anymore. But when you’ve been indoctrinated, and I certainly was, into that particular mindset, it’s hard to shake loose. Shaking loose represents, you know, hurting Jesus and it takes a long while to realize that’s just a shell game.”

So perhaps it’s not surprising that religion is also a major theme in the film Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, a 2003 documentary that will screen Wednesday at the Plaza Theatre in conjunction with the folk fest.

White acts as a guide in the movie, which finds him taking British filmmaker Andrew Douglas on a surreal tour of his hometown of Pensacola to explore the relationship between southern music and southern Christianity. It’s not a judgmental film, in fact White calls it a love letter to the area and its people. But it really wasn’t his idea, either. Douglas had come to visit White in hopes of convincing the songwriter that the title song of his debut record would be a good basis for a fiction film. In between attempting to talk Douglas out of that idea, White took him around to see the sights of his hometown, which Douglas eventually realized would make a good documentary.

It’s a common theme in White’s career. Accidents, some happy and some not, seem to have fuelled much of his career. After breaking free of his church, White embarked on a number of pursuits: surfing, modelling in Milan, film school in New York City.

He only learned to play guitar after breaking his leg twice within a couple of months, once playing baseball and again when skateboarding. Later on, another accident involving his left hand and a band saw had similarly unexpected results. He found that simplifying his guitar playing, which for years was restricted to what he could produce with only two functional fingers on his fretting hand, seemed to give a boost to his writing.

“Soon as I got out of the hospital, I started trying playing guitar with two fingers,” he said. “I started writing songs with two fingers. For two or three years I wrote two-fingered songs.”

Now, White’s half-dozen studio records sit alongside a growing canon of other works: visual art, short stories and even a Juilliard-commissioned score to an experimental Sam Shepard play that he released this year.

Not unlike another southern-gothic writer, the late Vic Chesnutt, White’s idiosyncratic vision has put him in high demand for collaborations. For years, he released records under David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label. Everyone from Aimee Mann to Joe Henry to the Barenaked Ladies have appeared on his records. This year’s release, Where it Hits You, featured folk band Ollabelle and jazz and funk group Shak Nasti.

“When I make a record, the idea is ‘How can I include as many people that I care about in the process,’” he says. “. . . I work with a lot of people and I’m so grateful that they say yes.”

Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus screens at the Plaza Theatre Wednesday at 9 p.m. with Jim White attending. White performs at 4:40 p.m. on Sunday on Stage 3 and at various workshops throughout the Calgary Folk Music Festival, which runs Thursday to Sunday at Prince’s Island. Visit calgaryfolkfest.com for a full schedule.

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